I Almost Built a Match‑Three Game Out of Spite

I have a specific anger reserved for one kind of software: the "match three" mobile game. The listing promises no ads and no time limits, and then you download it.

You know the kind. Four levels in and you're out of moves, watching a thirty-second ad, tapping the never-ending microscopic close button, waiting nineteen minutes for a life, or paying to remove ads that weren't supposed to exist.

So I decided to build the honest version. I've created award-winning mobile apps, so how hard could it be to develop a calm puzzle game? Charge a few dollars up front, with no ads, no timers, no nagging. How many of you would pay two bucks for that? I'd build it out of spite and let the market reward me.

Then I ran the numbers.

A paid game with no marketing and no audience gets found by no one. The app stores promote the games that make them money, and those are the ad machines I was trying to escape. Even being generous with every assumption, the spreadsheet didn't produce income. It produced a dinner out, and nowhere near enough to cover the nights and weekends I'd spend building it.

The garbage doesn't win because it's better. It wins because it out-distributes everyone else. The bait-and-switch funds huge ad budgets, which buy visibility, which buy users, which fund more ads. The honest game has none of that. It sits on a shelf nobody walks past.

I wasn't going to beat them by being right. I'd be fighting on the one axis where they're strongest, audience reach, and ignoring the only one where I had an edge.

And make no mistake, none of this is bad design. It's excellent design pointed the wrong way. Every timer and every pay wall was tuned as carefully as any experience I admire, just optimized for extraction instead of the person holding the phone. Good design removes friction, but this adds it. And then it names a price and sells you back the quiet.

So I'm not building it, yet. Not out of defeat, but because spite is a bad business plan and a worse product strategy. Here's the frustrating part. A few honest ones do exist, but they don't pop to the top. You have to go digging through the app store to find them, and one more wouldn't change that.

So I'll ask anyway: would you pay a couple dollars for a match-three game that just left you alone? I'd like to know how many of us there are, even if the market never will.